Thursday 31^st May

When we had our wonderful few days up the Gordon River on the West coast, we spent some time tied up alongside Stormbreaker, the yacht which usually brings white-water rafters back from their energetic Franklin River trips.

This time it had been chartered by Aurora, or the Hydro, or whichever branch of what used to be our state electric company.  Our lovely friend James Butler was on board – I think I wrote about this at the time.  We had met James, most fortuitously, in Honiara, and here he was again, right where we wouldn’t expect to meet anyone we knew.  He and his colleague, Ray, were great company.  They played cards with us late into the night and in daylight hours they took us for a walk along a little track we would never have known about, in to Lake Fidler.  It is a beautiful little lake.  But not beautiful enough (for me…) to justify spending days, weeks, months sitting in a small wooden shelter, not much bigger than a phone box, on a hard bench… And this is what one of our Tasmanian scientists did, year after year, very happily.  I think he took a little tent and slept away happily on a layer of muddy grass.  Then he would wake up and spent the days sitting, cold, damp, uncomfortable, but…happy in his meticulous studies.  I wouldn’t like to get this wrong but I think this was Dr Peter Tyler, from the Botany Department at Tas Uni.  He is a renowned limnologist and I now know, because I looked it up, that:

Limnology also called freshwater science, is the study of inland waters

During my months on 2XS I listened to many podcasts, and to many audiobooks.  I was particular fascinated to learn about the way scientists work.  No I wasn’t downloading too much Learned Information; my information mainly came from the likes of Bill Bryson, David Attenborough, the Science Show on ABC Radio National – information nicely prepared for people who like to go Golly and Gosh and Well I Never without having to strain their brains too much.  ScienceLite, that’s my sort of thing.  I came to realise that dedicated scientists don’t take their own physicals comfort into account at all.  They spend years going to the far ends of the earth, living in extreme climates, never once saying, “Oh no that mattress is too hard, where is my fluffy pillow; how I long for a cup of tea…”  So it’s not all that surprising that Peter Tyler was so happy sitting in his little wooden hideaway, with a thermos of cocoa, nicely laced with rum, I hope, carefully studying his meromitic lake.

And what is a meromictic lake, I hear you cry??  James did explain it to me; I listened carefully and then completely forgot.  I couldn’t even remember the name, only that it began with M.  (Maybe…)  Google is my friend and with a bit of luck and fair weather I found some research papers, and Peter Tyler’s name, so now you too know about meromictic lakes…

Lake Fidler is an ectogenic meromictic lake with a monimolimnion maintained by periodic incursions of brackish water from the lower Gordon River estuary.  A dam across the middle reaches of the Gordon River has restricted these incursions of brackish water and meromictic stability has rapidly declined.

So… Golly and Gosh and Well I Never and I see now why I completely forgot when James explained it all to me…